Dallas Stars Blog

Observations from a 4-1 loss

Brad Richards nailed this one when he said it wasn’t as if the Stars played awful, they just didn’t take advantage of their breaks.

The Stars waded into the game and didn’t take advantage of three first period power plays. Vancouver survived a slow start and then took over in the second period, scoring twice on the man advantage in the first five minutes. What’s more, the Canucks scored 26 seconds after starting the second period on a power play. Then, when it got its second consecutive power play (on a frustrated roughing penalty by Adam Burish), it scored in just eight seconds.

That is terribly frustrating for the Stars.

“For some reason against Vancouver our special teams have been terrible this year,” Stars center Brad Richards said. “It happened again tonight, I don’t know why.”

When asked what is so difficult about the Canucks’ power play, which has gone 8-for-15 against the Stars in three games this season (in fact, in the last 33 days), Stephane Robidas shook his head.

Just as frustrating, of course, was the fact the power play went 0-for-5 and gave up a short-handed goal. Loui Eriksson cut the deficit to 2-1, and then the Stars drew a great power play chance late in the second period. Instead of tying the game, however, the Stars gave up a short-handed goal when Brenden Morrow and Eriksson couldn’t connect on a pass.

“We were in the game there, but the short-handed goal, it’s tough to swallow,” Richards said. “It hit Loui’s stick and just exploded. It wasn’t like we were out of position, we had our position, it just hit his stick and exploded. It’s just one of those things. For some reason, in three games, they’ve gotten those bounces, we haven’t.”

And that’s fair. The thing is that against other teams, the Stars have forced the bounces. In their last 13 games, they are 8-4-1 with three of those regulation losses coming against the Canucks. So while the Stars can say they simply don’t match up against Vancouver, they do need to see just how well the best team in the West forces the issue.

“We had our opportunities tonight and we have to take responsibility for not jumping on the opportunities that we had,” Stars coch Marc Crawford said. “First period we had three power play chances and didn’t generate a lot on those three and they got on their opportunity and capitalized.”